Business Intelligence (BI) generally refers to software tools used to improve business enterprise decision making. These tools are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, customer and supplier analyses. More specifically, these tools can include: reporting and analysis tools to present information; content delivery infrastructure systems for delivery and management of reports and analytics; data warehousing systems for cleansing and consolidating information from disparate sources; and, data management systems, such as relational databases or On Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) systems used to collect, store, and manage raw data.
There are a number of commercially available products to produce reports from stored data. As used herein, the term report refers to information automatically retrieved, in response to computer executable instructions, from a data source such as a database, a data warehouse, or a datamart, where the information is structured in accordance with a report schema that specifies the form in which the information should be presented.
Data commonly manifested in reports, is critical to establishing business strategies and actions. Enterprises increasingly integrate data from a number of sources such as different databases, external streaming data feeds, and personal spreadsheets. Once this data is integrated it is difficult to determine which values in a report come from which source. In addition, it is not clear how fresh the data may be or if there are validity issues with the data source. For these reasons, the value of the report is questioned due to concerns regarding the accuracy of the underlying data.
Although, validation of data within a data warehouse may add some degree of confidence in the report, establishing trust in a report document merely based on the accuracy of data within the data warehouse may not provide a reliable measure of confidence in the report. Moreover, currently available enterprise reporting systems do not effectively link such validation information with the report.